ActiveWin: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Processor- Review

Installation of the AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ processor was very easy to do, the processor itself was already set on the motherboard when I started, all that was left to me was to install a new heatsink, place the memory on the board and then connect up the hard drive and the DVD-RW drive. This took a short amount of time thanks to the excellent Antec case we were using that gave us a good amount of space to work with. Installation was easy, we installed Windows XP Pro with SP2, this was via MSDN so it was all just one quick install, the installation itself was very fast indeed, I was stunned by how quickly Windows XP installed. Windows straight away detected that we were using a Dual-Core processor (checked via Task Manager), but we went ahead and installed AMD's latest driver to make sure everything would run as well as possible.

For most of our benchmarks, unless noted, we are not using the cool and quiet software that AMD provide. This was simply because it can sometimes hamper some of the hard core tests that we run, but don't get us wrong, its well worth installing for general end-users.

Here is a full run down of what we have inside our system and on the motherboard thanks to CPU-Z

CPU#1	APIC ID = 0
Name	AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+
Code Name	Windsor
Specification	AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+
Family / Model / Stepping	F B 2
Extended Family / Model	F 4B
Brand ID	4
Package	Socket AM2
Core Stepping	BH-F2
Technology	90 nm
Supported Instructions Sets	MMX, Extended MMX, 3DNow!, Extended 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, x86-64
CPU Clock Speed	2612.1 MHz
Clock multiplier	x 13.0
HTT Bus Frequency	200.9 MHz
L1 Data Cache	64 KBytes, 2-way set associative, 64 Bytes line size
L1 Instruction Cache	64 KBytes, 2-way set associative, 64 Bytes line size
L2 Cache	512 KBytes, 16-way set associative, 64 Bytes line size
L2 Speed	2612.1 MHz (Full)
L2 Location	On Chip
L2 Data Prefetch Logic	yes
L2 Bus Width	128 bits

CPU#2	APIC ID = 1
Name	AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+
Code Name	Windsor
Specification	AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+
Family / Model / Stepping	F B 2
Extended Family / Model	F 4B
Brand ID	4
Package	Socket AM2
Core Stepping	BH-F2
Technology	90 nm
Supported Instructions Sets	MMX, Extended MMX, 3DNow!, Extended 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, x86-64
CPU Clock Speed	2612.1 MHz
Clock multiplier	x 13.0
HTT Bus Frequency	200.9 MHz
L1 Data Cache	64 KBytes, 2-way set associative, 64 Bytes line size
L1 Instruction Cache	64 KBytes, 2-way set associative, 64 Bytes line size
L2 Cache	512 KBytes, 16-way set associative, 64 Bytes line size
L2 Speed	2612.1 MHz (Full)
L2 Location	On Chip
L2 Data Prefetch Logic	yes
L2 Bus Width	128 bits

Mainboard and chipset
Motherboard manufacturer	ASUSTeK Computer INC.
Motherboard model	M2N32-SLI DELUXE, 1.XX
BIOS vendor	Phoenix Technologies, LTD
BIOS revision	ASUS M2N32-SLI DELUXE ACPI BIOS Revision 0117
BIOS release date	04/18/2006
Chipset	nVidia C51XE rev. A2
Southbridge	nVidia nForce 590 MCP rev. A2
Sensor chip	ITE 8716

Memory
DRAM Type	DDR2-SDRAM
DRAM Size	1024 MBytes
DRAM Frequency	373.2 MHz
FSB:DRAM	CPU/7
CAS# Latency	4.0 clocks
RAS# to CAS#	4 clocks
RAS# Precharge	4 clocks
Cycle Time (TRAS)	12 clocks
Bank Cycle Time (TRC)	23 clocks
Command Rate	2T
# of memory modules	2
Module 0	Corsair DDR2 PC6400 - 512 MBytes
Module 1	Corsair DDR2 PC6400 - 512 MBytes